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Nick Hanauer and Eric Liu used digital advertising techniques to test out political messaging on different types of voters.

When two members of the 1% wanted to figure out how to get the 99% riled up (back in early 2011, in a pre-Occupy Wall Street time), they turned to e-mail marketing. Seattle-based duo Nick Hanauer, a tech entrepreneur who sold his advertising company aQuantive to Microsoft for $6.4 billion in 2007, and Eric Liu, a former presidential speechwriter turned media exec, wanted voters across the political spectrum to unite behind the concept of rebuilding the middle class. To figure out which political arguments would appeal to different ideological groups, they hired digital marketing company Marketfish to send eight different versions of an email from their non-partisan think tank, the True Patriot Network, to two million voters in the under $100,000/year income range. Then they studied how their Republican, Democratic, and Independent guinea pigs responded to the messaging.

Some of the e-mails talked about joblessness, others about foreclosures. Some were fact-based while others were emotional and angry. As happens with many e-mails that land in your inbox, information was collected as to whether the e-mail was opened or deleted, whether those targeted clicked on any of the content and visited the True Patriot Network website, and whether they then went on to share TPN content on social media sites, or acted on the site's prompt to e-mail their Congressman. Little did those emailed realize that the actions they took in response to the particular e-mail they received were being studied to reveal their "political persuasion profile."

Doing it this way was better (and cheaper) than testing messages by hiring a consultant to run focus groups, says Nick Hanauer. He and Liu were actually able to see which arguments worked on specific types of people to get them to (digitally) act.

"People on the left and right respond to inequality differently," says Hanauer. "People on the left think of it as unfair. People on the right think inequality is a sign of prosperity. But both respond to the idea that it’s a rigged game. Marketfish taught us that. "

The True Patriot Network went on to use these arguments in a recently-released book and in various editorials and appearances speaking about inequality issues.

"I'm not a bleeding heart liberal," says Hanauer. "I value you [in the 99%] because you’re a future customer."

What intrigued me about their information gathering was that it was predicted, in rather fearful tones, last year in the Filter Bubble. In the book, Eli Pariser voiced concerns about advances the advertising industry has made in the art of "persuasion profiling," or figuring out which methods of persuasion/pitches work best on specific people.

"In the wrong hands, persuasion profiling gives companies the abilities to circumvent your rational decision making, tap into your psychology, and draw out your compulsions," he wrote ominously. Pariser was less concerned about marketers using the technique to get you to load up on clothes and CDs than he was about political campaigns using the method to influence how people vote.

Pariser's concerns are a bit paternalistic. He worries that, once voters' psychologies are figured out, they'll be easily manipulated using online targeting. Whether or not voters are that manipulable, it is true that political campaigns are getting much better at online targeting.

Last week, the New York Times detailed how campaigns, including Romney's and Obama's, are increasingly using techniques honed by the online advertising industry to "put specific messages in front of specific voters." By dropping cookies on voters' computers, campaigns can send two different ads to the same household, so that a liberal-minded eighteen-year-old might be targeted with a different campaign video than his conservative-minded middle-aged mother.